Arthurian Legend in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

This is a wide-ranging overview of numerous transformations of the King Arthur Romance as it grew out of medieval stories, most famously brought together in Mallory’s “Mort de Arthur”, into contemporary expressions ranging from fantasies to comic books, science fiction films, and television series. This makes it an excellent reference for those wanting intertextual comparisons and an exploration of how a story that was originally used by the Catholic Church to attempt to reform real-life knights in western Europe, by providing an image of these rough warriors more in line with church policies, gets revised to express contemporary, often non-Christian views.

It has a clear feminist voice, consistently highlighting underlying masculine assumptions built into the story. Of course, the Catholic Church held such assumptions, so it is not surprising to find them in the main Romances they embraced (the etymology of romance literally means “little stories out of Rome meant to spread the word of Christianity). […]

I applaud books such as this study for helping all of us become more sensitive to outdated views.

Dr. Harry Eiss

Eastern Michigan University